Terminal Run

With that, the images in front of him bifurcated into two images, two simultaneous films of his life taking shape on the other side of his present, on the other side of a decision he must make now. In one future life he left the sinking submarine behind, continuing his life as a sole survivor, but limping through the rest of a dark and meaningless existence. In that life, he wore the label of coward even though no one had ever said that word to him, even though the board of inquiry absolved him of all wrongdoing in the sinking of the Piranha. He walked slowly through that life, his mother a living I-told-you-so, his father even sadder and darker, bearing a burden of guilt for exposing his son to the danger that nearly killed him but succeeded in ruining his life. In this existence young Pacino left the naval service and worked a fifty-year string of short-term jobs, none of them having any meaning, his life absent a wife or children, a dreary gray existence that ended in a hospital bed, alone, after a half century of chain smoking ravaged his lungs.

In the other image he turned downward and plunged back into the escape trunk, the hatch coming shut behind him, the operating mechanism rotating as he locked himself back into the sinking submarine. The visual part of the images ended then, as if what happened in the hull of the dying sub were too cruel to watch, but he could still feel his own emotions from the outside of the hull as it plunged vertically for the rocky bottom, finally hitting with a shudder and breaking apart, with Patch Pacino inside of it. In this shorter existence, he was reunited with Carrie Alameda, Rob Catardi, Wcs Crossfield, Duke Phelps, Toasty O’Neal, and the rest of the crew he’d grown to love, joining them in the final moments of the Piranha’s death, able to comfort them and help them through their own deaths, but the important thing was that he was with them, and that there was no corrosive guilt in this existence, even if this life did end minutes later at the bottom of the cold ca. He returned to the inside of a doomed ship, but he returned to the people he loved and who loved him, his real family. He died whole. He ended life as himself.

The final image was himself, clinging desperately to the top hatch of the escape trunk, about to make the decision that would determine who he was. Who am I? he heard himself ask.

The images darkened and vanished and when they were gone they took with them all memory of having been there. In the tenth of a second after experiencing this multidimensional lifetime review, Midshipman Anthony Michael Pacino remembered none of it. He shook his head, having returned to the moment after being confused for an instant, a mental discontinuity nagging at his consciousness, as if he had blacked out for a fraction of a second. Adrenaline flooded him, his tongue coppery, his heart jack hammering in his chest.

He had to go, he had to pull the carbon dioxide cylinder trigger and head for the surface. He was reaching for it with one hand, the other on the hatch ring, when something seemed terribly wrong. He was not sure he could explain what was happening even to himself, but instead of pulling the pin on the emergency inflation bottle, he reached downward into the blackness of the escape trunk, to the inside of the hatch seating surface, and pulled himself back inside the escape trunk, then grasped the operating wheel and wrenched the hatch off its open latch and pulled it toward his body, ducking beneath it. The heavy steel of the hatch pushed him back into the flooded escape trunk. The hatch thumped metallically on the seating surface. He spun the operating mechanism and closed it.

Lack of oxygen was making him dizzy, and he knew he was about to open his mouth and inhale water, and then he would die here, in the flooded escape trunk, alone. He reached over his head and found the top of the air bottle manifold, where the rubber hose of the regulator emerged, and followed it down until he reached the regulator. He plugged it into his mouth and punched the purge button. If nothing happened he was a dead man, and he would drown. What would it be like to die a death by drowning, he wondered. He wouldn’t have to wonder for long, he knew. But he could feel the regulator vibrate with the air bubbles pouring out of it. It was time to try to inhale. If he pulled in water instead of air, his conscious mind would shut down, leaving only a few miserable seconds of his reptilian brain to struggle against drowning.

Pacino inhaled, his eyes clamped tightly shut, but instead of deadly seawater, wonderful life-giving air came into his lungs, and he puffed ten breaths as if he had sprinted a mile. With the air came mental clarity and the realization that he had done something incredibly stupid, diving into the crippled submarine instead of lunging for the surface. But it was too late now, he told himself. He had to get below, to see if he could help the crew.